Empowering Coaching Clients With Challenging Questions

Do you find your coaching conversations are too comfortable for your client?
Are you getting a sense you’re not stretching your clients to create meaningful breakthroughs?
Do you notice you hold yourself back from asking challenging questions?

Our role as coaches is to stretch our clients to move out of their comfort zone in relation to their goals. Clients will often come to a coach because they don’t know how to reach a goal, or they know how to achieve the goal, but something is stopping them from accomplishing it. Or alternatively they don’t know who they are and what they truly want.

A coach will ask questions to challenge their own client’s boundaries of thinking to find their truth. This is because they trust and believe in the resourcefulness of their clients: that they have the answers for themselves within.

Change will not happen for any of us unless we are challenged – or questioned – to identify another perspective in relation to our thought processes, emotions and/or habits: our human experiences. And based on new or conscious awareness of what is desired or required to achieve a goal, a client then decides on new ways of being and doing outside of their current comfort zone to support the achievement of their goal/s.

People seek coaching because they want to create a shift in some aspect of their lives. As a coach, it’s our role to establish a trusting partnership where the client feels they are safe to be vulnerable where the coach can support them to notice other powerful ways of seeing, hearing and feeling their experiences.

New coaches often struggle with being fully present with their clients and stretching them to identify new ways forward, and instead, become engrossed with the details of the client’s stories. The conversation can become bogged down or too ‘friend-like’ and less ‘coach-like’. There is often uneasiness, with new coaches in particular, as they may not feel entitled to ask difficult questions, especially if they are not yet certified.

Coaching as a profession is not about being a ‘friend’, but rather stretching and supporting clients to identify new empowering habits, thoughts, emotions and ideas if they are not serving the client. Or alternatively, support the client to reinforce and enhance the habits and ways of being which create their desired experiences.

At the beginning of a coaching partnership, it’s important to educate the client as to what coaching is and set ways of working to support a conversation whereby clients understand difficult questions are sometimes necessary to create empowering change. Good coaches embrace uncomfortable topics of conversation to ensure their client creates the change they want for themselves.

Ultimately coaches support clients to recognise the opportunity to change is within themselves, and their only limitations are those which they perceive and choose to believe. Sometimes this means the questions we ask of our clients are difficult to answer because they challenge the client to go beyond their comfort-zone of thinking and experiencing in their world. Questions which bridge the gap between where they are now and where they want to be.

Those challenging questions are uncomfortable for the client because it activates the hijack response of flight, fight or freeze response in the brain. This is the primal reaction when someone is under a perceived threat. And a great coach will challenge these thoughts to help the client recognize they can take responsibility for these reactions and choose to respond differently in a way which is empowering for the client versus disempowering.

The brain’s hijack response can also occur within the coach, having thoughts such as “I have to be kind to my client, I better not upset them because they might not come back again” which may cause them to ‘flee’ the situation, for example, by appeasing the client. This is versus the coach’s response of holding space for them and trusting they are naturally creative, resourceful and whole and will find their way through uncomfortable emotions.

For the coach, managing this response is about trusting the professional coaching skills they have learned as well as the client’s resourcefulness. It’s also identifying ways to manage and reframe their own responses to step into their power as a coach, such as using affirming words such as “I am good enough” at whatever point in your coaching career you may be.

Practicing being fully present and challenging your client are essential parts of the coaching process in order to create a more effective, powerful way forward for both parties. As coaches, we are not there to be friends with our clients. We are here to support them in creating the positive change they wish to see.

Be empowered.